VIII.

Blood on the Tracks—the Chariot Race

Again comes the shock of axle on axle, of spokes on spokes; no mercy is asked or quarter given; one would think the drivers were pitted in savage war, so furious is their will to win, so ever-present the threat of a gory death.

—STATIUS, THEBAID, FIRST CENTURY A.D.

ANCIENT EVENT PLANNERS did not believe in delayed gratification: The Olympic program kicked off on a spectacular high on the morning of day two, with the most eagerly anticipated of all contests, the four-horse chariot race. This was a dramatic and lethal affair whose details Hollywood, for once, has not exaggerated. In fact, movie epics like Ben-Hur give quite an accurate idea of a chariot race’s delirious start, the confusion that would grow with each lap, and, above all, the sudden violence of the accidents. At Olympia, some forty vehicles would crowd the course and bloody crashes were guaranteed; after one particularly intense race, only a single vehicle managed to cross the finishing line. Even in Greek mythology, when the beloved hero Pelops had raced a chariot from Olympia for the hand of a princess, he caused the death of King Oinomaos (more about them later). Now, with its combination of glamour and high risk, the Olympic chariot race was the Grand Prix of antiquity—and the bareback horse races that filled up the rest of the morning’s program were hardly less murderous. By midday, some unlucky riders would be on the way to Hades, while others, blessed by the gods, would be celebrating with garlands in their hair. As if to recognize their fatal gamble, the day’s events would conclude with a haunting sacrifice of a black ram beneath the rising full moon, in which a priest poured the animal’s warm blood onto the burial mound of Pelops himself.

A chariot is harnessed before the race (from a Greek water jar, c. 520 B.C.).

The excitement began before sunrise. Spectators pressed forward toward a field to the east of the Hippodrome, where the charioteers were preparing in front of a marble colonnade, called the Portico of Agapantus. It must have been a spectacular scene, as colorful and chaotic as a Homeric army readying for war. Racing was traditionally the sport of kings in ancient Greece—one had to be very rich to maintain a stable of stallions—and it was still Olympia’s most aristocratic event. During the pre-Games period in Elis, weaker teams had been weeded out during practice rounds. Now forty magnificent vehicles were being tethered and yoked, and the pasture was home to a whole cavalry of thoroughbreds with names like Wolf and Breeze, their coats washed and gleaming with oil, kicking up dust in the first golden light. Grooms dashed back and forth on errands; wealthy owners came by for final inspections; the charioteers themselves, in their brilliant white robes, made their last vows to Poseidon, patron deity of horses.

A Hollywood re-creation of a chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959).

Fans paid attention to every detail, weighing up the chances of each vehicle. There was no formal betting system, but ancient Greeks loved to gamble, and made friendly wagers on the race; true enthusiasts had watched the horses exercising and even sniffed their dung in the pastures, to learn the quality of their fodder. The four horses on each team ran abreast, with the strongest pair placed in the center of the quartet, tethered securely to the chariot’s pole; the outer pair, chosen for agility in the turns, were connected by leather straps. All had ornamental reins and bits, and in some cases jewel-encrusted nosebands. True to the chariot races depicted by Cecil B. DeMille, the rigs were fragile shells, made of light wood or wicker for speed. The design had not changed since the time of the Trojan War: They were authentic war chariots, but brightly painted, decorated with leather, sheet bronze, and silver inlay.

The crowd was thick with flamboyant young noblemen greeting one another, along with ambassadors and foreign dignitaries in their most regal outfits. Taking advantage of the potential for business, the most beautiful courtesans made cameo appearances, sparkling with expensive silk and jewelry (fashion and racing were intimately connected long before the Royal Ascot). This was the day at Olympia for extravagant gestures. The charismatic and dashing young Athenian Alcibiades famously entered seven chariots in the race of 416 B.C. He even arranged history’s first sports-sponsorship deal, convincing the island of Chios to provision the stables for his twenty-eight horses. It was the celebrity owner of the chariot, not the driver, who received the accolades if he won; like Thoroughbred jockeys today, the charioteers were strictly professionals hired for the event, and only the most generous of noblemen let his driver be remembered in a statue or victory song. However, those few aristocrats who did risk their lives on the track were even more celebrated: In the fifth century B.C., Herodotos of Thebes is praised in one of Pindar’s odes for taking the reins himself, while a Spartan named Damonon and his son Enymakratidas together pulled in sixty-eight equestrian victories at eight local festivals. The pair erected a splendid monument to themselves, and would be remembered for centuries.

This system of owners “winning” the chariot races had one progressive side effect: It allowed women to circumvent the ban on their participation in the Olympics. This feminist breakthrough was made by a Spartan princess named Cynisca, who won with her chariots twice, in 396 and 392 B.C. She erected a lavish memorial thanking Zeus for her triumphs; in the centuries that followed, other brash noblewomen followed her example.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the danger, charioteers were a superstitious bunch. They put charms on their vehicles—a model phallus to ward off vindictive spells, and drawings of concentric circles as protection against the evil eye (a symbol that is found throughout Greece and Turkey today). Chariot races were favorite targets for black magic. Rival owners, jockeys, and gamblers paid witches to place curses on opponents’ horses (“Drive them mad, without muscles, without limbs,” reads one lead curse tablet excavated by archaeologists, “let them be unable to run or walk or achieve victory, or even leave the starting gates . . .”). Other spells were aimed at the hapless charioteers themselves: “I bind the hands [of drivers] . . . send them blind . . . let them be tossed to the ground, so that they are dragged by their own vehicles throughout the Hippodrome. . . .”

No wonder the charioteers felt vulnerable as the crowds inspected their rigs. As the poet Statius said, “The thrill of courage mixed with dread ran through their fingertips and toes.”

The Sacred Turf

HAVING HAD THEIR fill of ogling the chariots, eager spectators elbowed their way into the Hippodrome itself. Modern archaeologists have found no trace of this eponymous horse track—it was washed away by floods during the Middle Ages—but we know that it was located in the flat river plain to the south of the Stadium. The descriptions of ancient sports fans allow us to reconstruct its appearance. Unlike the grandiose urban circuses of the Romans, with their rows of stone seats and enormous obelisks, the Hippodrome at Olympia made the best of its natural setting. The noisy crowds stood on steep grass embankments, with the front rows protected only by flimsy wooden barriers erected around the track. The racecourse itself was six hundred yards long by two hundred wide—three times larger than the Stadium—and defined only by two stone pillars, marking the turns at each end. All around the arena were altars, plaques, statues, and offerings, including hundreds of tiny chariots and wheels, commemorating past victories and disasters.

The purple-robed judges solemnly took their seats in a ceremonial box, located by the finishing line, but spectators preferred better views of the accidents, and clustered most heavily near the turning posts. These two stone pillars reminded the crowd that the turf before them was laden with myth: Mounted on both were bronze statues of the beautiful princess Hippodameia crowning the victorious Pelops. Pelops was actually the hero most beloved by athletes at Olympia, and was the particular patron of charioteers. He was probably a real historical figure whose exploits were enhanced over the centuries by Greek legend. Drivers and spectators alike enjoyed recounting the saga of his success.

According to mythology, King Oinomaos of Elis had devised a deadly courtship ritual for the hand of his daughter: He allowed prospective suitors to drive off with her in a chariot from Olympia, and the king would pursue them in his royal vehicle. It was literally a race to the death: If the suitor was faster, he could marry the princess; if he was caught, he would be speared by the king. None had escaped. A dozen men’s heads were nailed to the palace gates when the handsome wanderer Pelops arrived to take up the challenge (the date, historians guess, was around 1280 B.C.). But Pelops decided to leave nothing to chance: He bribed the royal charioteer, Myrtilos, to loosen the king’s axle pins. The next day, when Oinomaos raced off in pursuit of Pelops, the wheels of his chariot flew off, the king was killed, and bolts of lightning rained down from heaven to incinerate his palace. Pelops married the lovely Hippodameia and assumed the kingship of Elis. But rather than thanking the treacherous Myrtilos for his victory, Pelops flung him from a cliff.

It might seem a little disconcerting that this so-called hero had won his victory by bribery and chicanery. But Greeks took pleasure in the cunning of Pelops, reveled in his character, and forgave his methods. The tale was beloved in the same way as anecdotes about our own flawed sports heroes such as Babe Ruth and John McEnroe.

AS TRUMPETS SOUNDED, the charioteers entered the Hippodrome in a splendid single-file procession, the horses high-stepping around the track. The riders held the reins in the left hand; in the right, they carried whips or goads—long sticks with bells or jingles on the end. One by one they would approach the judges in the company of the chariot owner. Heralds proclaimed the name of each competitor, his father, and his city, then asked if anyone in the crowd had any charge to bring against him. At the end of this, the head judge gave a long-winded address to the assembled group. Finally, each charioteer drew a lot from a ceremonial urn and cantered off to take his position in the starting gate—which happened to be one of the strangest contraptions in sporting history.

Called the aphesis, Olympia’s starting gate was a typically ingenious Greek solution to a perennial racing problem. At other top-ranking tracks like Delphi and Corinth, chariots simply started in a line at the sound of a trumpet, which meant that vehicles at the end had to run farther to reach the first turning post—a critical disadvantage in any race. To promote fairness, an Athenian inventor named Kleotas designed a gate in the shape of an enormous triangle. It protruded onto the turf like a ship’s prow, with booths for each chariot and an elaborate crank system that opened the forty gates in reverse order, letting the last charioteers burst onto the track first. This clockwork creation made practical use of the Greek advances in geometry: By staggering the start, every chariot had a more or less equal chance of reaching the first post, eliminating the insider’s advantage. Judging from ancient descriptions, the aphesis was a strange and wonderful sight, decorated with a bronze dolphin and a gleaming eagle that were both part of the working mechanism. Naturally, it took time for charioteers to negotiate their way into their designated gates, adding to the excitement in the crowd. Old men, former drivers, boasted of their own experiences; others recalled the advice of King Nestor to his son in Homer’s Iliad—that it is not always the fastest horses that win a race; the skill of the charioteer is paramount:

One type of driver trusts his horses and car

And swerves mindlessly this way and that,

All over the course, without reining his horses.

But a man who knows how to win with lesser horses

Keeps his eye on the post and cuts the turn close,

And from the start keeps tension on the reins

With a firm hand as he watches the leader.

Once the starting mechanism was set—the horses champing at their bits, wrote the poet Statius in another vivid description of a Greek chariot race, “their eyes darting flame, they smoke and pant in stifled rage”—the chief judge signaled by dropping a handkerchief. An official immediately pulled a lever, and the great machinery cranked into motion like a vast toy clock. The bronze dolphin began to drop, the eagle rose, and, accompanied by a trumpet blast, the gates began to open.

It must have been a breathtaking sight, as two chariots at a time pounded out of the gates, until all forty were on their way. Greek poets competed with one another to come up with fresh metaphors for their speed, saying the vehicles shot forth “like javelins,” “swift as Harpies,” “fast as a torrential river,” roaring “like a whirlwind,” like lightning or shooting stars. Sophocles gives us a more concrete glimpse of the scene: “The clatter of the chariots filled the whole arena, and the dust flew up to heaven. They sped along in a dense mass, with every driver cracking the whip to break out of the pack, trying to leave behind the whirling axles and snorting steeds, and each man saw his wheels being splattered with foam, and felt the hot breath of rival horses on his back.”

The 180-degree angle of the turn posed a deadly test of skill. The left hub had to pass the post without scraping it. Drivers who misjudged were tossed over the rail, entangled in the reins, while their horses ran wild over the course, to the screams of the crowd. The unlucky would go under the hooves of the following chariot, causing multiple pile-ups.

And those who made it safely could not relax for long—there were twenty-three turns in each race.

THE CHARIOTS TOOK only fifteen minutes to cover the twelve double laps—about six miles—but the time seemed like an eternity, with every turn producing new catastrophes and triumphs of skill. The charioteers were agonized by stress, bouncing over rutted ground that they had to scan desperately for debris. The roar of the crowd was deafening. “Who can describe your shouts,” asked the orator Dio the Golden-Tongued, “the commotion and the agony, the bodily contortions and groans, the awful curses you utter? The horses won’t go any slower if you behave with decorum.” Down on the track, the very air, wrote Statius, “hissed with the sound of the oft-plied lash.”

Again, divine intervention was crucial, for better or worse. At Olympia, drivers feared the eastern turning post, because here they had to pass an altar known as Taraxippus, the “horse terrorizer”—a small stone shrine that was believed to strike mad panic into horses and cause innumerable accidents. Learned scholars like Pausanias debated the magical causes of the phenomenon. (Was the spot haunted by a demon or cursed by witchcraft? Was it the grave of the royal charioteer Myrtilos, murdered by Pelops? Or were the bones of King Oinomaos himself buried here, his ghost forever taking revenge for his untimely death?) Modern historians have observed that the altar was located precisely where the early-morning sun blasted into the eyes of charioteers and horses as they sped along the southern track, accentuating their confusion and cranking up the danger.

Teams of Olympic attendants were poised to drag mangled chariots out of the oncoming traffic and calm maddened horses. Sophocles describes one accident: “As the crowd saw the driver somersault, there rose a wail of pity for the youth, as he was bounced onto the ground, then flung head over heels into the sky. When his companions caught the runaway team and freed the blood-stained corpse from his rig, he was disfigured and marred past the recognition of his best friend.” There are no accounts of incidents when chariots careened into the audience, but it would have been a statistical certainty.

As Homer observed:

The chariots sometimes rolled, sometimes hurtled

Over the ground, and the drivers stood in them

With their hearts pounding for victory, calling

To their horses, who flew along in the dust.

The crowd was at a fever pitch as the chariots reached the last lap, announced by another trumpet blast. Spectators shrieked, swore, wept, tore their hair, and hid their faces, their cries drowning out the thundering hooves. As the dust settled, the racetrack resembled the aftermath of a battle more than a sporting event. The winning charioteer leapt from his rig, his snow-white tunic now filthy, his face encrusted with dust, and approached the judges—where he was joined by the owner, still clean and perfumed, with fragrant hair. The owner would later receive the wreath at the awards ceremony, but for now the driver shared the adulation of the crowd. Both men would have the victory ribbons wrapped around their foreheads and arms, while the spectators roared their approval and showered them with flowers and olive twigs.

ALTHOUGH THE IMPARTIALITY of the Elian judges was legendary throughout Greece, there were occasional arguments about split decisions, errors, and favoritism, especially in the equestrian events. Not only could fellow Elians enter horses—they were famous for their stud farms—but the judges themselves would enter. This peculiar situation erupted in a scandal in 372 B.C., when a judge named Troilus won two of the three chariot races. The subsequent ill will convinced the Elians to ban judges from competing—although Troilus kept his pair of olive wreaths, and erected a statue in his own honor.

But the low point in Olympic judging came in the Roman era, when the emperor Nero decided to compete in the Games of A.D. 67 and debut in the chariot race. The judges, after accepting monstrous bribes of 250,000 drachmas per head, bowed to the emperor’s every wish. Nero arrived at the racetrack with an unwieldy ten-horse chariot. He was thrown from his rig and failed to finish the course, but the judges magnanimously declared him the victor anyway. At the victory banquet, the emperor declared: “The Greeks alone know how to appreciate me.” Olympia, however, did regain its self-respect. The next year, Nero was murdered in Rome. His name was struck from the victors’ list, and the judges were ordered to pay back their bribes.